Jeffery Deaver - The Lesson of Her Death

"Yup." Kresge took the riot gun and Corde got a moment's pleasure watching the man's thick hands load and lock the gun as if he'd been doing it since he was five. They climbed out and started along the path.

Kresge said, "I hear something in the woods. Over there."

Corde looked, squinting through the low light that shattered in the dense woods. "You see anything?"

"Can't tell. Too much glare."

"What'd you hear?"

"Footsteps. A dog maybe. Don't hear it anymore."

"Keep an eye on our backs," Corde said.

"He's just a professor."

"Our backs," Corde repeated.

Crouching, the men walked side by side to the complex's directory. Corde found the super's apartment and rang the bell. No response. He motioned with his head toward the upper balcony. Together they went up the stairs.

Corde whispered, "You never done this before so we're going in the front door together."

"Okay with me," Kresge said sincerely, the last of his words swallowed in a hugely dry throat.

"Let's go."

Beneath them a horn blared.

Corde and Kresge spun around. Jim Slocum's cruiser – with Randy Sayles handcuffed in the backseat – pulled leisurely into the parking lot. Slocum honked again and waved. "Hey, Bill," he called, "thought you might need some backup."

"Jesus Lord," Corde whispered harshly. "Jim, what're you doing? He's gonna see you."

Slocum got out of the car and looked around. He shouted, "What say?"

Corde jumped out of his crouch and ran for the front door of Gilchrist's apartment, shouting to Slocum, "Watch the back, behind the building! Watch the back."

Corde and Kresge stood on either side of the door. Kresge said, "If he's in there he knows he's got company."

"I hate this," Corde said.

Kresge said, "You ever do this before?"

Corde hesitated. "Not exactly, no." He knocked on the door. "Professor Gilchrist. Sheriffs Department. Open the door."

No response.

"Let me try." Kresge pounded on the split veneer of the door. "Police, Professor. I mean, Sheriffs Department. Open the door!"

Nothing.

Corde reached for the doorknob. Both men lifted their guns toward the sky. Corde turned the knob and shouldered it open. They leapt inside.

Jim Slocum turned toward the backseat of the cruiser. He said to Sayles by way of explanation, "I figured they needed some backup." And he drove around to the back of the apartment complex.

"Look," Sayles said, "I'm not real comfortable here."

"Minute," Slocum said, and got out of the car. He unholstered his service revolver and looked around the unkempt yellow lawn.

"You can't leave me here. I'm innocent."

"Quiet."

"You can't keep me here!"

"Please, sir, I'd appreciate it if you'd just shut up."

"Get the goddamn rope fingerprinted. Are you listening to me? Are you listening to me?"

Jim Slocum had been – all the way from the Auden campus – and he was pretty tired of it. He leaned forward. "Shut… your… mouth. Got it?"

"You can't keep me here."

Slocum wandered off to the apartment building's detached workshed. He went up on tiptoes, looked through the window and noted that there was no one inside then he stepped behind it to take a leak.

Breathing stale air Corde and Kresge moved farther into the apartment. On the floor next to them was a wooden coat rack and umbrella stand carved with the bas relief of a hound treeing a bear. Corde glanced at the bear's black glistening mahogany teeth and walked past it.

In the living room the scents were of mildew, moist paper, dust and a sour scent as if a pet had grown old and ill in the room. The light, dimmed by drawn curtains, barely illuminated the space, which seemed uninhabited. The bookcases were filled but the jackets of the volumes all were matte paper imprinted with dull inks, old-style typography. The wooden chairs were coated with dust, the upholstered ones weren't indented. A dust sphere leisurely followed Corde into the living room.

The men danced past each other, stepping into rooms and covering each other – a choreography that Kresge learned quickly. Corde could see he was unnerved and trying to look three directions at once. They secured all the rooms except the kitchen.

They paused outside the closed French doors.

Kresge had his index finger curled around the ribbed trigger of the scattergun. Corde lifted the sizable finger out and straightened it along the guard. He then nodded toward the door and together they pushed inside.

Empty.

Kresge picked up a cup coated with a moldy layer of dry evaporated coffee. He set it down. Stacked on the table were literary magazines, books, dense articles. "Delmore Schwartz: The Poetry of Obsession." "Special Problems in Translating the Cantos. " "The Rebirth of the Poet Warrior"…

The feeling first came to Corde as he stood flipping through the blank notepad beside the yellow telephone, which was decorated with a sticker in the shape of a daisy. He paused as the crinkling chill began at the knob of his neck and swept down his spine. His scrotum contracted. One by one he lifted his fingers off his pistol and he felt the pads of his fingers cool from evaporation. He looked around him at the still, pale doorways, out the window at a black gnarled willow trunk.

He's nearby. I can feel it.

Kresge dropped the journal back down on the table.

Corde walked to the stove and touched the top. It burnt his hand. The tea kettle too was hot but then he tapped the metal again cautiously and found that the pilot light was heating the empty pot. He left the kitchen and returned to the second bedroom, which served as Gilchrist's study. He searched the desk. Papers, letters, drafts of articles. Doodles. There were no photos. Nothing gave a clue as to what Leon Gilchrist looked like or where he might be.

A chill again shuddered through Corde's back. Corde had to share this. "He's nearby."

"What?"

"I feel him. He's around here someplace."

Kresge pointed to a coating of dust on the wood floors and the linoleum. Only their footprints showed. "He hasn't been here for a long time."

Corde said, "We'll get the Crime Scene boys to go through it, take some paper samples and fingerprints. Let's get out of here."

Slocum was walking out from behind the apartment building. He met Corde and Kresge in the parking lot. "I heard something behind there. I went to check but I didn't see anything. If he had a car it's gone."

"We should call in a county APB," Corde said. He walked toward his car. "DMV license and any tag numbers. Let's get back to the office and fax an ID to the state and the FBI. Get a picture of him from the university."

"Yessiree, let's move," Slocum said.

They found though that they had to make a detour.

Which was to drive Randy Sayles to the emergency room at Harrison County Community Hospital. Corde drove, hitting speeds of close to a hundred on the straightaway of 302, while Kresge crouched in the back, applying fierce pressure to the slashes in the man's carotid arteries. Because Sayles's hands were cuffed to the armrest in the backseat of the car, Gilchrist had been free to cut deep and with fearful precision.

At the hospital, while Kresge cleaned up as best he could, Corde sat in a blue plastic chair in the lounge. He sat forward, his chin in his hands. The doctor walked out of the ER and after surveying the three cops chose Corde, to whom he said simply, "I'm sorry."

Corde nodded and stood up. On the way out of the door he glanced at the sky and believed he saw for a moment a silver crescent of waxing moon before it was obliterated by an oncoming storm.

The way Sarah thought of it was that her world suddenly turned joyous.

For one thing, she woke up without the pitchforks in her stomach, the way she always felt on school days and still felt sometimes when she awakened from a dream about class or about taking a test. This morning, sitting up in her bed, she felt perfectly free, floating and safe. It was like she had all the good parts of running away from home but still had her family and her room and her magic circle in the forest behind the house.